The Moon question is a bit of a facetious one, but one already in the QM community. ("Is the Moon There When Nobody Looks?" is the title of a very intriguing, but very off-topic paper by David Mermin.) Seeing one's shadow violates the spirit of the premise, which is, does physical reality exist when unobserved in any way?

That could take us far off topic, but the relation to Jupiter's chromophores is: If they form rather quickly upon exposure of some fresh, upwelling white clouds to certain conditions of sunlight, it may be pernicious-bounding-on-impossible to witness the process taking place, because the daylight that permits the process alters the conditions.

Even there, I'm being a bit over-wary. We have no idea if the chromophores form on such a rapid timeframe. If they form over a span of hours or days, there's no inherent difficulty. If they form via a process that begins and completes on the scale of seconds or minutes, we do have a problem. But that's just a conjecture to point out the potential difficulty. But in no case do I expect quantum mechanical superpositional states to be a relevant phenomenon.

I certainly agree that the chromophores last longer than a day. We don't (generally) see any profound color differences between parcels of cloud between the morning and evening circumstances. It may be that the chromophores are relatively permanent once created, in which case the only part of the process that we will get to observe will be the creation.

There are certainly many thorny variables: Vertical transport, temperature, solar (UV) illumination, altitude, and then the entire chemistry book. I don't know how close we are to understanding the phenomenon, but these Juno photos certainly seem to offer a new kind of observation in support of understanding it.

In Seán's comparison, you can nicely see the effect of brightness stretch without, and with partial illumination adjustment. When you don't adjust for illumination, the darker parts of Jupiter approximate black on gamma stretch.

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QUOTE (JRehling @ Feb 14 2018, 07:39 PM)

The Moon question is a bit of a facetious one, but one already in the QM community. ("Is the Moon There When Nobody Looks?" is the title of a very intriguing, but very off-topic paper by David Mermin.) Seeing one's shadow violates the spirit of the premise, which is, does physical reality exist when unobserved in any way?

Quite simple, the Copenhagen interpretation of QM isn't applicable without an observer. You'll need to switch to a more symmetrical version of QM, where the observer is part of the system. In this version, assuming the non-existence of an observer would mean the non-existence of the moon, since parts of it could otherwise play the role of an observer.

QUOTE (JRehling @ Feb 14 2018, 07:39 PM)

Even there, I'm being a bit over-wary....

You missed possibly, that some spectral constraints are available. Those have been, and are going to be used to find best fits, or to rule out some chemical settings. So you can narrow down, which photochemical processes are to be considered. We also have ideas of which small molecules are available in Jupiter's atmosphere, like molecular hydrogen, ammonia, methane, water, and others. Those can be analysed regarding their decomposition under UV, together with the reaction paths of the formed radicals, constrained by the spectroscopic data.Here is one of these attempts published last year. There are certainly some competing schools with different approaches, and at the end it could turn out, that a planet more than 1,000 times the volume of Earth could be more diverse than everyone thought...

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